HOME WORK

Editor-in-chief ANNABELLE HICKSON

Creative Director GIOTA LETSIOS

Director SARAH BARRETT

Editorial assistant and stockist manager CATE GILPIN

Special thanks RYAN BUTTA MAGGIE MACKELLAR Customer Service WENDY BARRETT

Subeditor MELODY LORD Imaging MICHAEL SYKES

CONTRIBUTORS

Fiona Bateman Louise Beaumont Naomi Bulger Nicky Cawood Meaghan Coles Joseph Corkhill Lisa Marie Corso Amber Creswell Bell Ceri David Harriet Davidson Alaina Dean Tess Durack Pip Farquharson Julie Gibbs Simon Griffiths Sarah Hall Elisa Hassey Marnie Hawson Ed Hickson Megan Holbeck Charlie Kinross Laura McConnell Mark McGinness Charlie Maslin Meg Mason Megan Morton Daisy Noyes Jim Osborne Clancy Paine Errol Parker Pamela Pauline Michael Pham Tim Ross Kate Shannon Anson Smart Hugh Stewart Julia Stirling Lean Timms Joe Wigdahl Charlotte Wood

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©Galah Press Pty Ltd 2021 ISSN 2652-8959. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, or other direct or electronic methods, without the prior written permission of the editor, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. Printed in Australia.

Galah acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which this publication is produced and read. We pay respect to Elders past and present. Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons.

Cover photograph Clancy Paine Inside front cover Annabelle Hickson Pages 14, 54, 80, 121 Daisy Noyes Opposite page Ed Hickson

a letter from the editor

I WANTED THIS ISSUE TO BE ABOUT THE DOMESTIC, BECAUSE I FIND IT SO HARD: COOK, EAT, CLEAN, REPEAT. NO MATTER HOW WELL YOU DO IT ON ANY GIVEN DAY, IT’S THERE AGAIN THE NEXT.

Sometimes I wonder if not having to look at unfolded washing anymore is the secret upside of death. Nora Ephron said it was not having to worry about your hair, but I’ve already given up on that.

It is genuinely perplexing to me how to deal with the domestic. In many areas of life I consider myself to be competent, but not at home. When I hear about friends going away for a few days and lling the freezer with meals so their partners don’t have to cook, I want to collapse at their feet and wail, ‘How?’

I long to be practical and thoughtful. I long to nd meaning in the day-to-day routines. I long to not long for something else. After all, I want this glorious, repetitive, domestic life. I can almost touch it, but then I hit perspex.

What really fries my head, though, is that it’s here at home where you need to be at your smartest; at your least numb. It’s where you (and by you I mean me, but hopefully you too) are faced with your most intimate, confronting and complicated feelings.

Long-term relationships are not easy. Resent, react, recover, repeat. Love, hate, soften, repeat. Home is where you can let your guard down, which can be frightening. To my great shame I am always better behaved when there is someone ex familia in the house. If you want your relationships to persist, let alone mature and evolve and thrive, you need to be a high-level, emotionally intelligent ninja with the courage to face and understand your own behaviours and feelings, and those you live with. And who wants to do that?

How do you be Martha Stewart and Esther Perel at the same time? How do you want to both wipe down the benches and have sex on the benches? How do you compartmentalise your one self into such distinct roles?

I simply do not know how to nd a stepping stone between the numbed-out vegetative state of throwing packets of pretzels into lunch boxes on autopilot and taking responsibility for my weird passive–aggressive schtick that I roll out whenever I feel let down. And so I hop from one end of the spectrum to the other while obsessively reading about other people’s struggles with the domestic.

When Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård writes about parenting young children with his wife and says that dinnertime comes as a surprise to them every night, I say, ‘Karl, it does for me too.’ When he more bleakly writes that everyday life with its duties and routines is something he endures, not enjoys, I soberly nod along.

Some more hopeful words are found in the books of American writer Mary Catherine Bateson who writes so beautifully about how we can compose our lives, about how we can make meaning even as we study and work and raise children, while creating and recreating ourselves.

She says that making a home is about creating an environment in which learning is possible. The goal of the domestic sphere is to compose a place for you, and those you share it with, to learn. And for some reason this perspective makes me feel instantly less desperate. We don’t have to work it all out and solve it. We just have to learn.

All of the stories in this issue have helped me think about domestic life in some new way. They have helped me learn. Unfortunately, they have not helped me fold the washing, which is what I really wanted them to do. But sitting here all together, they do illustrate that there is no one way of doing the domestic. Sometimes domestic life can be wonderful. Sometimes it can be hard. And it’s almost always a bit of both.

Annabelle

Photographer Clancy Paine captures beauty in the ordinary moments of the everyday at her home near Narromine, New South Wales.